Using the Raspberry Pi to Turn an iPad into a Real Computer, part 2: The iPad

In my last post, I talked about why I wanted to do this project, which was mostly about not wanting an old iPad to sit in a box with all my other crap. It was also about a clever use of a Raspberry Pi. While 99% of the work in this project is setting up the Pi, this post is about setting up the iPad.

Growing up the iPad
My daughter got the iPad when she was 4. We bought it refurbished from Amazon. As much as I dislike Apple as a company, and as a platform, the quality of their hardware is impressive. We put the iPad in a pink foam bumper case. It was subjected to all manner of child induced terrors: spilled milk, sticky fingers, being left to die in random places. Despite being 2 years old when we got it, and her using it for probably 5 years, it’s still in pretty good shape. The screen cracked in one corner.

I cleaned it up, and I put it in a cheap folio case.

Blink
The only real modification I made to the iPad was to install a Unix shell app called Blink. Blink has some essential tools like ping and ssh, along with the ability to map hostnames to IP addresses in a manner similar to /etc/hosts.

The app is $20 per year, it’s meant to be used for home automation, and includes a lot of that. If you aren’t into that you can just shake your iPad every day or two and keep using the app for free.

The iPad’s on screen keyboard doesn’t have some essential keys, like CTRL or arrow keys. If you are going to spend time in the Unix shell, you should probably have a hardware keyboard.

Keyboard
My wife has a Bluetooth keyboard that she uses to live-Tweet TV episodes sometimes. It doesn’t have a touchpad, it runs off of AAA batteries instead of being rechargeable, but it does have arrow keys. The F-keys (F1-F10) behave a little strangely, which I will go into more in the next post about configuring the Pi.

The most practical solution would be a keyboard with a dedicated CTRL key, arrow keys, and a touchpad. If I end up using this gear a lot, I might splurge on a cool keyboard.

I spent a little while shopping for 60% mechanical keyboards. Buying a keyboard is definitely outside of the “shit laying around the house” constraint. A retro-gray keyboard would give the iPad some cool Unix style. A 60% keyboard doesn’t solve the touchpad problem, however, and a lot of 60% layouts don’t have dedicated arrow keys.

Battery
The Raspberry Pi doesn’t have a built-in battery, so using it portably requires a battery bank. I have a small collection of batteries thanks to amateur radio and owning a couple of smartphones with terrible battery life.

The Raspberry Pi 4b requires more amperage than the previous models. I have plugged the Pi into the battery for testing purposes, but I haven’t tested how long the battery lasts with the Pi plugged in. These batteries can completely charge two tablets from 0 to 100% simultaneously, so I am pretty sure I can get several hours of use with the Pi. Of course, in a situation where I am charging the iPad and my 4G hotspot, that duration lowers significantly.

And now, the fun begins: Setting up the Raspberry Pi

Dan Harmon on the Sexuality of Fallout 4

At my core, I am a tabletop role player. I play a lot of video games, but table top RPGs are my jam. To paraphrase an obscure Fight Club trailer, after tabletop DND, playing video games is “like watching porn when you could be having great sex.”

I so when I *ahem* play solo video games, there is some part of me that wants to put a backstory to either my choices or the choices the game makes for me. When I would marry Mjoll the Lioness in Skyrim and her boy Aerin showed up with her, I figured we were doing some kind of Viking age polyamory type thing.

In Fallout, you get the option to romance a number of your companions, and so I just assumed that my dude was a pan-sexual version of Captain Kirk. Once I loaded the mod that keeps your wife from dying, and she becomes a companion that you can romance… well it was Mjoll the Lioness all over again.

Apparently Dan Harmon also plays FO4 and he agonizes over the choice to romance the companions, and his guilt over it is hilarious.

When I play FO4, my survivor identifies as a white male. I also run the “Nora Spouse Companion” mod that allows me to also run Nora. Once I have reached affinity with her and then with Codsworth, I run with Preston. I also have the Gunners vs. Minutemen pack from Creation Club and I take Preston with me for the entire quest, once we have retaken The Castle. 

Between retaking the Castle, helping out settlements, and paying the gunners back for the Quincy massacre, I usually hit full affinity with Preston. I then go for the gusto with the romance options and then finally, I set him up as the leader of his own settlement via Sim Settlements, usually Starlight Drive-in.

Preston has had a rough go of things. He watched his idols, the Minutemen, fall apart. He had all of the soldiers and most of the civilians he was responsible for die on his watch, and he ended up in a siege at the Museum Of Freedom at Concord. It not a stretch to say that when you meet Preston Garvey, it is on the worst day of his life. If anyone deserves love and fire support, it’s Preston.

Fallout 4 in the time of COVID19 part 2: Mod Madness

Now that I am at the 2 month mark of quarantine, I have gone more than a little crazy… with Fallout 4 mods.

I loaded up ‘Sim Settlements: Rise of the Commonwealth‘ over the weekend, and it’s pretty cool. It’s a kind of autopilot for building out settlements. Settlements are an important part of the game, because they are a source of money and materials that I need to progress through the game. They are also a quick way to spend 40 levels or so building shotgun shacks for people who complain all the time about not having any beds. Also, I am not super creative with settlements, so I end up building the same things over and over.

ROTC puts the settlers to work building everything themselves. All I have to do is supply them with food, water, liquor, and drugs. The theory is that now I can spend less time building shacks and more time rolling down the streets of the Commonwealth shooting people in the head. ROTC isn’t quite the optimal build experience I was hoping for. This has nothing to do with the quality of the mod, and everything to do with the way I play Fallout.

My two main trading hubs are Sanctuary Hills and The Castle. I basically divide the ‘Wealth into two hemispheres. In the western half, all trade goes to Sanctuary. In the eastern half, traders go to The Castle. I eventually build out all of the settlements with vendors and work benches and hit them up as a traverse the ‘Wealth. It’s kind of reminiscent of The Walking Dead. The two hubs are linked together by a trader (usually Sheffield) and as I pick up new settlements, I send one settler to the closest hub to make building out the settlement that much easier.

Once I have those two trading hubs going, I’m in business, and the other settlements pretty much fall into place. In ROTC you select a settlement leader and the settlers go to work scrapping things and building stuff. The results are these awesome looking post-apocalyptic junk-towns full of crazy little nooks to explore. Overall, it’s pretty awesome.

There are a few problems though; and they lead me to loading more mods.

Problem #1: The Settlers scrap all my shit

There is warning box that literally tells you this is going to happen. I don’t know what I expected.

Once I pull the trigger, they literally knock the whole place down. Including all of the things I built to get the settlement off the ground INCLUDING THE GODDAMN ARTILLERY!! Both my little martial arts and crafts space at Sanctuary and the field artillery at The Castle disappear the second I tell them to get to work.

So if I let the settlers build out all of the settlements, then I have to find a place for me to do my thing. I am sure that if I knew more about ROTC, or city plans, or something, I could solve the problem The Right Way(tm) but that’s really not my style.

In the beginning, I used the Red Rocket Truck Stop as my main trade hub, and devoted the other settlements to being junk-towns. This worked fine until I realized I also needed an eastern trading hub. The solution of course was to use another mod.

The Red Rocket Redone settlements mod turns every Red Rocket into its own small settlement. I was doing this anyway with the Conquest Camping mod to serve as a kind of overflow housing for when my settlements were getting crowded. Now, I am doing the reverse. The Red Rocket mod makes the Red Rockets better suited for settling than Conquest, and I can take them over early on in the game. Now, as I move across The Commonwealth, I gain these buildings as support bases.

With these Red Rockets now under my protection, I can have ready access to workbenches and the like without hunting for them in the crazy junk-town settlements. I can also put artillery at each one to get fire support when I need it. Sure, I have to build out the settlement a bit to support the settlers that I dedicate to trading and gunnery, but if I can keep it small and simple, I can probably do beds in the Red Rocket, and maybe an additional shack for the settlers and put the rest to work trading between settlements. Plus the Red Rockets tend to have all the crafting stations without needing to build them. This is important early in the game because it takes a while to get the perks I need to build workshops myself. Now it’s fairly easy to pop in just about anywhere on the map take a nap, scrap stuff, and craft things.

Problem #2: The Settlers grow the wrong shit

As much as I love not having to plant tons of crops, this does impact the supply of crops that I actually care about. A motivating factor for building settlements is that they produce money and salvage. But they also produce crops. Corps are great for keeping the settlers from bitching about being hungry, but they also have two other distinct uses:

1. You can sell food at vendors for additional caps.
2. You can turn specific crops (purified water, corn, mutfruit, tatos) into vegetable starch, which you can use as adhesive to create just about every weapon or armor mod.

I know it’s probably not very appetizing for the settlers to live on a steady diet of superglue ingredients, but I need scopes and shit for my rifles so I can fight for their freedom goddammit!

So the next solution builds on the first, which is to grow glue components at my Red Rocket settlements with the help of robots via the Mister Gardener mod. Now, when I turn up a Red Rocket, I can outfit it with a couple of food bots to grow my starch components. There is a suite of bot mods available from the author, so I went ahead and loaded them all because I just love robot pets. I especially love the Mr. Law mod, that puts a Protectron on guard to help defend the place.

Problem #3: The Settlements sell the wrong shit

Another benefit of having settlements is being able to sell off loot and stock up on ammo and useful scrap. Vendors will eventually appear in the junk-towns, but it’s only after a lot of upgrades. When I was building out Red Rocket settlements using Conquest, I just put a weapons vendor there so I could sell off loot and buy ammo. Now that the Red Rocket Settlement mod makes them act more like real settlements, I can put more vendors there and collect some caps as well. It’s not a bad way of doing things, since I have Red Rockets set up as trading hubs anywa. It’s like I have a chain of franchises: The Red Rocket Trading Company. These trading posts are getting kind of advanced though, so building defenses is now becoming a priority. I wanted to park one of my companions at each one to help with defenses, but…

Problem #4: The Settlements suck up all my companions

I like to roll with a whole crew when I do my thing: Dogmeat, Warmachine, and a companion. Unfortunately, ROTC requires a companion to serve as city leader to oversee the construction of the junk-town, which basically confines the companion to the settlement. Obviously, that kind of restricts my ability to use companions for either my traveling entourage, or as security for my Red Rockets. So did what I always do, and I loaded a few more mods.

One idea was to add Nora as a companion and travel with her exclusively. She is cool, but because you get a new perk for reaching the topmost level of affinity with a companion, there is an opportunity cost associated with not taking on new companions.

I also thought about trying to load the male version of Nora, the Nate companion, and fully lean into the idea of my survivor being this pansexual polyamorous version of Captain Kirk, just banging everyone in The Commonwealth, but both mods depend on your choice of gender at the beginning of the game. So much for my statement against societal and gender norms.

Then I happened upon Nobody’s Leaders which lets you use named settlers, like Sturges or Ronnie Shaw in place of a companion. This lets me put a named settler in charge of each settlement and I can go back to roaming The Commonwealth and either helping, murdering, or seducing everyone I meet. Then, once I have extracted all the value that I can from them, I dump them at one of my numerous properties around the wasteland to guard farmers and shit. It sounds very predatory when I say it that way.

Sim Settlements and Rise of the Commonwealth have significantly modified my game experience in Fallout 4. Which is very welcome, because I don’t really have the mental or emotional space for a new game right now. My family is currently playing the new Animal Crossing, and I don’t even have room for that.

Fallout 4 in the time of COVID19

It’s been a whole year month of working from home, plus a three month week bout of the virus itself. I have been playing video games, mostly FO4, to cope with the stress.

I am on another play through, this time with mods. I loaded some simple ones, like the Unofficial Fallout 4 patch and the Castle Walls Restored mod, which doesn’t really affect game play that much, other than maybe making the castle easier to defend.

The two game-play affecting mods that I have been running are the Everyone’s Best Friend mod, and the Conquest mod.

Everyone’s Best Friend lets you have a companion and Dogmeat at the same time. As companions go Dogmeat isn’t as good as a humanoid. He can’t use a gun, his melee attacks don’t do as much damage, and he can’t carry as much as a humanoid. Also, even though he can’t be killed, I still feel like shit when he gets hurt. According to the mod, a case could be made that Dogmeat was intended to travel alongside a companion, like Meeko from Skyrim. Without the mod, I just place him at Sanctuary or Red Rocket where I presume he gets taken care of by the settlers.

With the Best Friend mod, a humanoid companion, plus the Sentinel add-on, I have a whole entourage accompanying me around the wasteland. Dogmeat serves as the early warning system; He barks when he locates an enemy. Then, Warmachine rushes in once I start shooting. I still get killed on occasion, but for those little encounters with random Raiders or Ferals, it goes a lot faster. Dogmeat’s scouting is important when I put myself and my companion into suits of power armor and then we roll around the Commonwealth with Warmachine like a small bipedal tank division.

I have blown up the Brotherhood and the Institute enough times that it’s not really about the story anymore, it’s more about the Zen of building up the Minutemen and the settlements. In that vein, the Conquest mod makes for an interesting take. Essentially, the mod equips you with a camping kit so that you can create a little settlement anywhere you want. You can create a little cooking stove, a sleeping bag, tent, and a portable generator for hooking up a construction light. It’s a fun little way to rest up, scrap some equipment, without needing to return to a settlement. I don’t do it all the time, but it’s a good way to stay focused on a quest line, and not get pulled into fixing settlement problems all the time.

The other thing that you can construct at a campsite is a workshop that turns the site into a settlement. You can create up to 10 ‘outposts’ this way. I like to create them a couple of miles from my official settlements to act as a kind of overflow area for the busy/happy settlements that reach capacity fairly quickly. Stores at these outposts let you buy and sell, but they don’t produce caps as well as they do at actual settlements, so I skip the General Stores and Bars, which are cash cows for settlements, and stick to weapons vendors so that I can restock on ammo.

As for locations, I like to use existing structures, like Red Rockets. These tend to have workbenches already in place, so mostly I just need to put in beds, crops, and water. If there are beds set up in these places already, they don’t count for the happiness of the settlers.

You also have to build out defenses because they will get attacked, by both the natural spawns in the area and by the random settlement events. I think it’s fun to put them not far from trouble spots, like College Square or the Quincy Ruins. I then tool up settlers before I move them out to the outposts so I can drop by on occasion to watch the fireworks. Another fun thing to do is build the camps on the military checkpoints after the Institute has been defeated. You have settlers standing by to help the Minutemen during their events, and you have Minutemen to help defend the settlers during their events. Also, it feels good, from a role play standpoint, to build more and better defenses and shelters for the Minutemen at the checkpoint. These dudes are just standing around in the elements 24 hours a day, waiting to get roughed up by god knows what.

I am also interested in the Sim Settlements mod, though I haven’t loaded it up yet. My goal is to find create a gameplay experience that is bascially Animal Crossing with guns.

Fallout 4 gets me through the holidays

I have been playing Fallout 4 for several months now. The holidays are very stressful for me, so I decided to pick up some creation club add-ons to spice things up.

My last play thru, I sided with The Minutemen against the Institute, took on The Brotherhood of Steel, and freed the traders in Nukaworld. Minutemen vs. The Brotherhood is a spectacular way to finish the main quest line. Also, removing the slave collars from the traders caused everyone’s outfits to glitch, turning Nukaworld Bazaar into a nudist colony. Enjoy your freedom you kinky bastards!

This time thru I sided with The Railroad. The quest line is ok, if a bit stressful. There were moments where I thought I had accidentally backed The Institute.

I also picked up the sentinel power armor addon, the settlement ambush kit, and some of the free armor and weapon skins. I normally don’t go for DLC, but it was a little Christmas present to myself. Skinning armor is nice because it unifies the paint scheme for disparate pieces of armor, which makes your outfit look nice even though the pieces are mismatched. Surprisingly, it’s not that big of a deal for my player character, but it’s nice when outfitting settlers and provisioners. Putting Minutemen or Railroad logos on mismatched armor helps me to not accidentally shoot friendlies during raids. Seeing an armed person walking down the road in Minuteman armor is nice from a role-play standpoint. Like order is being restored to The Commonwealth.

The Sentinel Power Armor

The Sentinel armor is interesting in that it effectively adds a second companion. Much like how Skyrim let you have both a dog and a human companion, this lets your “pet” be a full suit of power armor. You can equip it like a companion, and it’s default weapon is full auto laser rifle. Probably the best feature is the personality mode, which lets you choose between the Protectron, Assaultron, or my personal favorite: Mister Gutsy. My nickname for him is “War Machine.”

Having a companion with you long term can get annoying when you hear them say the same things over and over, especially Preston’s judgmental ass criticizing me for picking up scrap. You know that sniper scope on that bad ass rifle you carrying? I made it with junk I be scavenging. I put this shit to good use, Pres, so shut up. The Mister Gutsy personality option doesn’t talk much, it just mostly accuses all hostiles of being Communists. It’s pretty awesome, except when I am trying to creep up on a target to back stab it and he suddenly yells “IS THAT SOMEONE THAT NEEDS ME TO KICK THEIR ASS!?!?!”

You can load the sentinel up with gear too, but once it’s been outfitted with a full set of power armor, his carry capacity isn’t great, and it’s a pain accessing the menu for it, so I just use it in extreme emergencies. Also, the sentry armor doesn’t get damaged the way that wearing power armor can, so there is way less to maintain. Putting a companion in power armor sounds good in theory, but they get shot up and you end up repairing their shit all the time. I am not sure if the quality of the armor matters for the sentinel, so I just throw basic armor with Minuteman or Railroad paint on War Machine and roll out.

My current play thru is on “Very Hard” mode, which means that a lot of enemies could one-shot me at the lower levels. Having a War Machine with me is nice because he rushes in to the fight and draws out enemies so I can snipe them from a covered position. He repairs himself, but not very quickly, so it’s possible for him to get shutdown, and you have to physically access his console to jump start the repair process. This is different than having a robot companion that you can use a repair kit on. It’s not as fast as using a repair kit, but it doesn’t take any materials. Once you get used to his cover fire, you can notice real quick when he and the companion are down, because suddenly everything is shooting at you.

Automatron

Speaking of robot companions. I think that my favorite expansion is Automatron. I am a sucker for pet robots, and building a robot to protect a settlement is one of my favorite things to do in the game. I especially love the Mister Handy torso, and using it to make my own varieties of Mister Handy, like one with giant caliper hands and pincer legs that I call “Mister Pinchy”, or one with giant saw blades for hands and buzz saw legs that I call “Mister Slicey”. Other models include “Mister Shooty” who has minigun arms, and “Mister Tradey” who has all of the storage mods, and works as a Provisioner.

I also built a Sentry Bot for The Castle that I named “Sarge” after the malfunctioning robot in The Castle basement. I wish you could repair him specifically so that he could have a real personality. But he looks pretty cool rolling around The Castle keeping his big red eye on things. The other thing that would be great is to put faction paint on robots. Mister Shooty would look pretty awesome with a Minuteman paint job.

Once you have done the Mechanist quest line, you end up with Jezebel as a kind of settler. She refuses to interact positively with you, so while you can assign her to jobs at a settlement, and she will do them, she makes a lousy shop keeper because you can’t buy or sell anything. She just complains about you. I just put her to work at Graygarden as either a farmer or security. I would send more robots to live and work at Graygarden, but I think that having a bunch of companions at one settlement is a waste. I like to send Codsworth to live there, until Ada shows up, then I send him off to another settlement. I guess I could return him to Sanctuary and send Preston to The Castle, but I kind of like having Preston at Sanctuary for some reason.

I don’t know if having multiple companions at a settlement affects how many settlers that you can attract, but I like to wait until a settlement is maxed out population-wise before I add robots. Companions seem to make better security personnel than regular settlers, so that is the job I usually give them. Good security becomes a major deal when you start provoking raids with the Settlement Ambush Kit.

Settlement Ambush Kit

The settlement ambush kit adds a couple of cool things. You can add walls and a special guard tower to your settlement, which makes defending it a lot simpler because your guards stay in one place, rather than roaming around. You can also add remote view video cameras that let you kind of fast travel from one site to another without actually leaving. A funny glitch with the sentinel armor is that it will physically go to the site you are viewing, so switching camera views makes War Machine run all over the place to stand in front of your camera.

A really cool feature of the kit is the ability to send out fake distress signals that trigger raids. So far I have only fired it up once, but it just sends wave after wave of raiders to your settlement, and it keeps score of how many waves you have survived. I am assuming there is one for ferals as well, but I haven’t tried it yet. I re-rolled my character not long after getting it and right now my settlements are ill-equipped for a massive raid.

The Tipping Point

Now that I have done two full re-rolls, I can say with relative confidence that the game balance shifts when your character level hits the mid 40’s. If you have been doing settlement building and Minutemen quests consistently, they should be producing caps, food, and salvage to the point that you are crafting most of the things you need (oil, adhesive, stimpaks) and mostly buying ammo, aluminum, and steel. My first play-though went over 100th level, and the game was fairly easy to play at that point. I had settlements that had nuclear reactors, multiple industrial water purifiers, and laser turrets protecting everything. The main story line can put you in front of Kellogg pretty quickly, and he can be really tough to beat at low levels. Having multiple combat perks combined with high end weapons and armor make a big difference.

I think a challenging play through would be to use no companions or Sentinels, and to skip the Minutemen all together. You will still end up with settlements, but you probably wouldn’t have nearly as many. I might try that when I re-roll again, supporting either the Institute or the Brotherhood of Steel. I think that both of those factions also want some form of settlement, so you may end up with them anyway.

My Life with Multitops: using multiple types of laptops

It’s the end of the year, and I have a lot on my mind. So rather than deal with it, I am going to write about laptops. I have owned many laptops over the years, most of them have been refurbished or re-purposed from some other role. In many ways, I am a bit like a crazy cat lady, but instead of cats, I am surrounded by laptops. I tend to own and operate a few laptops because I have a few specific use cases with different hardware requirements. Rather than calling them laptops, I like to refer to them by the purpose that they serve for me.

1. Typetop – A big laptop that is suited for long typing sessions. In the past I wrote (and hacked, and coded) a lot more than I do now. I used to write papers for school, reports or emails for work, blog posts, or creative works. While my ideal writing environment is an office chair, large monitor and a buckling spring keyboard, any table with laptop that has a full-sized keyboard will do. I don’t consider these large and rather heavy machines to be mobile so much as portable. Of my fleet of laptops, the ones optimized for typing also tend to be the most expensive. This is the model that I normally go for when an employer is picking up the tab.
2. Notetop – A tiny laptop that is suited for note taking. I have spent many hours in lecture halls and the like taking notes for classes. I don’t really use a laptop for notes at work, unless I am the designated minutes-taker, for example when I worked at a startup company out west, or in my time on the board of directors at Hive13. For class room notes, nothing beats a small netbook, especially if you are also carrying around textbooks and paper notebooks. I found that the accessory pocket in a backpack kept the laptop from being smashed by textbooks. It’s too bad that the iPad pretty much destroyed the market for cheap netbooks, because I dearly loved those old MSI’s.
3. Jettop – A burner laptop for travel. I used to travel to hacker conferences like DefCon, and you would occasionally need a laptop, but there was always a chance that something awful might happen to it. It might get stolen, it might get confiscated by law enforcement at an international border, it might get hacked by someone with way better skills than mine, or someone [like me] might drunkenly vomit on it or throw it out of a window. To minimize this risk, I would take a cheap laptop with minimal personal information and strong encryption. Once I started carrying a smartphone, I would also travel with an old flip phone, just to be safe. Later on, I would just take my work phone and turn off WiFi and Bluetooth. In later years, I bought a refurbished Chromebook and traveled with it. I found that a Chromebook along with a small Android tablet combined to make a good, lightweight, toolkit.
4. Shoptop – A laptop for hardware hacking. In the years I spent with Hive13, I was always in need of multiple ports to connect to things around the shop. I would use multiple serial or USB ports to connect to hacker hardware like Arduinos or old copiers and printers. Even today I occasionally need to plug in multiple large external hard drives to share pirated goods at events like 2600. In the past, I have found older laptops to be indispensable in these “workshop” environments due to their legacy ports. For me, workshops are also fairly dangerous places, where laptops get exposed to power tool mishaps, fire, and on more than one occasion, blood. It is these dangers, combined with a need for old ports, that I prefer to keep older laptops around, however under-powered they may become. I am not sure what I will do in the future, when even my eldest laptop has only a couple of USB ports. I suppose that a shoptop is the kind of thing that I should probably build myself. I keep wanting to get back into electronics, maybe a DIY shoptop would be a good way to get started.
5. Crashtop – A laptop for network configuration and troubleshooting Pretty much always the secondary function of a shoptop, looking into network crashes pretty much always requires a laptop. For a dude that tinkers with computers, I like to think that I have a decent grasp of networking. Not just cabling, but also routing, switching and even telephones. My home network is as much a lab as it is anything else. My main router has a console port, and while most of the network configuring I do is with SSH or a browser, sometimes you just need a laptop that you can physically plug in to a device. Of all the legacy ports to disappear from a modern laptop, I will miss the gigabit Ethernet port the most. Sure there are USB serial and Ethernet adapters, but those just aren’t the same as having the gear built right in. Also like the shoptop, I often think about either building a device, or maybe refurbishing a vintage device to troubleshoot networks with. I have always wanted a very industrial-looking 80’s device like the old Informer 213 for terminal-type stuff. At one point in my life, I had an old laptop that had a voice modem in it so that I could also mess with analog telephone lines.

I am not in the market for a new laptop just yet. My typetop plays Skyrim and Fallout 4 decently. Plus it’s time for me to get into consoles again 🙂

Being Addicted to Fallout 4

In the past, I have written about playing video games to cope with depression. It’s that time of year again, so I am playing games a lot. I basically love 4 kinds of games:

1. Open world RPGs with various factions, families, and morality systems (like Skyrim or Fable)
2. First-Person Shooters with engaging single player stories (like Half-Life)
3. Farm management games with community, friendship, and/or romance dynamics (like Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley)
4. Tower Defense games where you manage funds/materials/etc to build steadily stronger fortresses
5. Pretty much anything where you have robot minions

Fallout 4 is basically a turducken of these various game elements. It’s pretty much the most addictive thing I have ever encountered. Imagine a dish made by the guys from Epic Meal Time, using only ingredients provided by the guys from Breaking Bad. Fallout 4 is basically things I like about Skyrim, dialed up to 11.

I picked up the full Fallout 4 suite on a ridiculous Steam sale a few months ago, and I have spent pretty much all of my non-sleeping, non-working, and non-child-rearing hours playing it. I know the game is like 5 years old. My gaming hardware is also 5 years old. Fight me.

In Skyrim, I loved helping kids and dogs. I basically forgot about the dragons and focused on amassing gold in order to build a house for everyone. Then it turned out that Lucia is afraid of the swamp where I built the house, so I had to win a civil war for her so we can live in peace and safety in Windhelm.

Well, in Fallout 4, not only are you searching for your lost son, you meet Dogmeat within the first 10 minutes and he’s way more bad ass than Meeko. I did a ton of work to ensure that Dogmeat was safe at Sanctuary Hills, under the watchful eyes of Codsworth, while I searched for Shaun.

Another thing I loved about Skyrim was meeting, marrying, and traveling with Mjoll the Lioness. She was a total bad ass, and so she and her dude Aerin come to live with me, the kids, the dog, and the House Carl in some kind of weird Nordic polyamory version of The Brady Bunch.

Well, in Fallout 4, I was able to seduce Preston. We took on the raiders, ferals, and supermutants of the commonwealth while building settlements together. *Then* I was also able to seduce Piper, Curie, and Hancock. I was like some kind of post-nuke/pan-sexual version of Captain Kirk, getting in fights with and/or boning robots and shit. Again, taking something I liked from Skyrim and turning the volume up to 11.

As much as the memes liked to dunk on Preston for never shutting up about helping settlements, settlements fucking rule. Which is the other way that Fallout 4 got me: Building. Fucking. Farms. I set up a bunch of settlements, planted crops to feed the settlers, and built shacks and shit for them to live in. Oh, and I surrounded them with automated turrets. There’s nothing greater than hearing on the radio that a settlement needs help, just to fast travel there and watch the attackers get shredded by my sentries.

Life in The Commonwealth is much easier when you have large supplies of ammunition and caps. A holdover from my Skyrim days is my tendency to sneak about, shooting targets from a distance. My survivor is a decent sniper, but he really only gets to clip a couple of targets at proper sniper range. After that, he has to creep up a bit closer. At sniper range, I like to use a .50 cal hunting rifle. While closing the gap I like to use a custom .308 combat rifle that I call “Quickshot.” It’s great for putting things down with two or three rounds, and it’s silenced. If I have time to line up a headshot, like in VATS, I can put most things down with one round. The problem is that .50 and .308 ammo is kind of rare so I am constantly purchasing it. One way to make lots of caps and to buy ammo at a discount is to set up vendors at the various settlements. I put up a weapons stand and I can usually buy 50-100 rounds of .308 every couple of days. Every time I come to a settlement to drop off salvage, I hit up the emporium for .308, .50 cal, and shotgun shells.

I tend to hoard .45 and 5.56mm to hand out to settlers that work security. I build out combat rifles and assault rifles for the provisioners and settlers assigned to guard posts and to scavenging stations. These dudes get my hand-me-down weapons and armor, as well as stuff I’ve looted off of Raiders. When a settlement gets attacked all of the settlers will run to fight, so it doesn’t hurt to outfit even the farmers with armor and upgraded weapons. When you are 80th level or so, your settlements can have like 20 people in them, so that’s a lot of gear to be handing out. There are like 20 settlements in the Commonwealth proper, plus the ones for Far Harbor and Nukaworld, which means that the endgame for me is all about dealing arms to your peasant militia.

Another luxury item to have is large amounts of salvage. Most vendors will let you buy large shipments of salvage for a thousand or more caps. When you are maxing out the defenses of a settlement, or building lots of robots, you tend to run low on aluminum, steel, and oil. One way I get steady access to lots salvage is to set up trading emporium at my settlements as well. This lets me buy salvage in bulk. One particular item that you need tons of is adhesive. You can craft vegetable starch at a cooking station by combining corn, mutfruit, and tatoes. So putting folks to work farming these items at your settlements is important. Once you have a large supply of vegetable starch, you can sell off the excess that appears in your workshops. Once your local traders are out of caps, you can go to the Diamond City Market to unload the rest. If you set up a clinic, you can also buy bloodpacks which you will need to make stimpaks. Depending on your selection of perks, you can keep your survivor going on just stimpaks.

The other advantage of numerous settlements is provisioners. With the Local Leader perk, you can add a settler to a trade route. This lets you share the salvage that you have with all of your trading settlements. Provisioners will then walk the roads between their trading settlements on a regular basis. Obviously, this is very handy for building out new settlement, or for getting supplies to smaller settlements, but there are two other advantages:

1. If you find a provisioner out in the wild, you can dump any excess items or salvage on them, and the items will eventually find their way to a settlement workshop.
2. If you arm and armor a provisioner, he or she will engage the random spawns that happen out on the road, making The Commonwealth a tiny bit safer for you and your other settlements. I tend to use Sanctuary Hills and The Castle as my main trading hubs. It’s funny when a random attack happens on one of these places when there are half a dozen traders standing around. It’s like having extra security. Building custom arms and armor for provisioners and settlement security is a good way to safely earn XP as well. If you combine building settlement stuff with crafting while abusing the “well rested” perk, you can level yourself a bit without getting killed constantly.

The morality system is fairly strict as well. I have rolled back a game more than once because I chose poorly at a critical juncture. I will go back through and play the other way, as a bad guy or whatever, at some point. I must have played through Skyrim a dozen times trying to create the perfect play thru, or at least as perfect as I can get it before something bugs out 🙂

I am on my third re-roll, each time siding with the Minutemen, working with the Railroad, and against the Institute and the Brotherhood of Steel. I also decided to wipe out the gangs of Nukaworld. Nukaworld is great fun, even if you are being a good guy. Although taking on the gangs does feel a bit genocidal at times.

Network File Systems and VMs: old school Unix meets the new school virtualization

I have been replacing low end servers with virtual machines for a while now, and it’s been kinda rad. In a previous post I mentioned replacing a physical server with a VM for Bittorrent. The results were fantastic.

The typical problem with BT is that it devours bandwidth and gets you busted by Hollywood. The other problem is that it also devours disk space. I solved the first problem using Swedish Internets, but my disk problem was actually exacerbated by using a VM.

In the past, I would just throw a big drive into a dinky little Atom CPU box and snarf torrents all day. When I set up my Proxmox cluster, my VMs were still using local drives. For a while, my Turnkey Linux Torrent Server VM had a 500GB virtual disk. That worked ok. I would grab videos and whatnot and copy them to my NAS for viewing, and once I seeded my torrents back 300%, I would delete them. This was fine until I set up a RetroPie and started grabbing giant ROM sets from a private tracker.

Private trackers are great for making specialized warez easy to find. The problem is that they track the ratio of what you download compared to what you upload, and grabbing too much without seeding it back is a no-no. I now find myself grabbing terabytes of stuff that I have to seed indefinitely. Time to put more disk(s) into the cluster.

I spent way too much money on my NAS to keep fretting about the hard drives on individual machines, virtual or otherwise. So the obvious choice was to toss a disk in and attach it to the VM through the network. I like using containers for Linux machines because the memory efficiency is insane. My research indicated that the best move with containers was to use CIFS. I couldn’t get that to work, so I went with the tried and true way: NFS. NFS is really the way to go for Unix to Unix file sharing. It’s fast, and fairly easy to setup. It also doesn’t seem to work with Proxmox containers, because kernel mode something or another… based on the twenty minutes I spent looking into the situation.

So I rebuilt my torrent server as a VM, and used NFS to mount a disk from my NAS like so:

In the /etc/fstab on my torrent server I added this line:

192.168.1.2:/volume2/Downloads /srv/storage nfs rw,async,hard,intr,noexec 0 0

Where –

1. 129.168.1.2 is the IP address of my NAS
2. /volume2/Downloads is the NFS export of the shared folder. I have a Synology, so your server config will probably be different.
3. /srv/storage is the folder that I want the torrent server to mount the shared folder as. On the Turnkey Torrent Server this is where Transmission BT stores its downloaded files by default.
4. The rest of the permissions mean it’s read/write and that basically anyone can modify the contents. These are terrible permissions to use for file shares the require privacy and security. They’re fine for stolen videos and games tho.

Once that is in place, you can mount it:

mount /srv/storage

And you’re set.

Because the disk is on my NAS, I can also share it using CIFS, and mount it to my Windows machines. This is handy for when I download a weekly show, I can watch it directly from the Downloads folder and then delete it once it’s done seeding. I like doing this for programs that will end up on Netflix, where I just want to stay current, rather than hanging on to the finished program.

This worked out so well that I decided to spin up a Turnkey Linux Media Server. For this little project, I basically duplicated the steps above, using the folder I have my videos shared on. So far, I have it working for serving cartoons to my daughter’s Roku TV, and my Amazon Fire Stick. I have plans to set the Emby app up on the kid’s Amazon Fire Tablets soon, once I figure out the app situation which is probably going to involve side loading or some other kind of Android fuckitude.

Of course, my media files aren’t properly named or organized, so I will have to write a script to fix all of that 🙂

UPDATE: During the holidays, the private tracker in question did an event where you could download select ROM sets for free and get a bonus for seeding them, so the brand new disk I bought filled up and I had to buy another. I couldn’t migrate a single disk to RAID0, so I had to move the data off the disk, build the new array, and then move the data to it. An operation that took something like 36 hours for 4TB via USB 3.

Also, not being able to use NFS with a container is apparently a Proxmox limitation that has been remedied in the latest release.

Adventures in Proxmox Part 1: Words About Boxes

It’s been a few weeks since I exorcised HyperV from my life like an evil demon. I have replaced it with Proxmox and so far it’s been mostly great. With a couple of serious caveats.

My transition to Proxmox has been a rather involved, not so much because Proxmox is hard to set up (it’s not), but because I am tired of slapping old junky hardware together and hoping it doesn’t die, and then scrambling to fix it when it inevitably betrays me. Unlike most dudes with home servers and labs, most of my acquisitions were made years ago to support an MMO habit. Specifically multiboxing.

I call them “computers” because they are computers in the sense that they have CPU’s, RAM, and HDD’s. But they were low-budget things when they were assembled years ago. The upgrade path works something like this:

1. A computer begins its life as my main gaming machine that will run my favorite game at a satisfactory speed and resolution.
2. Then I find a new favorite and upgrade the gaming machine’s guts to run the new game.
3. The old gaming guts get transplanted in to my “server” where they are *barely* able to run a few VMs and things like that.
4. The final stage is when the server guts are no longer up to the task of running VMs. I then add a few old network cards and the “server” then becomes my “router”.
5. The old router guts then get donated somewhere. They’re not really useful to anyone, so they probably get shipped to Africa where they get mined for gold and copper by children at gunpoint.

Breaking the [Re]Cycle of Violence
In the years since then, I have taken to playing epic single player games like Skyrim. These games really only need one machine. The rest of the gear I used to run little “servers” for one thing or another, which I have slowly replaced with VMs. The problem with using old junky computers as servers is when you run them balls out 24 hours a day. In my search for a replacement VM host, I spent a lot of time researching off-lease servers. My goal was to have 8 cores and 32gb of ram, with the ability to live migrate VMs to another [lesser] host in an emergency, something that my HyperV setup was lacking. After a lot of consternation, I decided that since a single VM would never actually use more than 4 cores or 8gb of RAM, why not use 2 [or more] desktops?

I found some old off-lease quad-core Intel desktops for about the same retail price as a low end server processor. I used the RAM from my older gaming machines/VMservers and some hard drives from some old file servers to build out my “new” Proxmox cluster. With two quad core desktops running maxed-out memory(16GB each) I managed to satisfy my need to be like the other kids with “8 cores with 32GB of RAM” for about the price of an off-lease server chassis, with the added bonus having a cluster. The goal is to add nodes to grow the cluster to 16 cores and 64GB of RAM, while also adding clustered storage via Ceph to make use of old hard drives from file servers.

New hot servers is old and busted. Old busted clusters is the new hotness.
For me, the clustered model is better, in my opinion for a number of reasons. It mostly has to do with modularity:

1. You can build out your infrastructure one paycheck at a time. Part of the problem with off-lease servers is that while the chassis is cheap, the components that go in it are expensive and/or hard to find. The deal with servers is that the cost of the motherboard and CPU are nothing compared to what you will spend on RAM. I was looking for something I could start using for less than $200, and a refurb desktop and RAM from old gaming boxes got me going at that price point.
2. Desktops stack on top of each other for free. I don’t have any server or telco racks, so in addition buying ECC RAM, I would also be buying a rack, rails, and all of the other stuff that goes with them. This would easily eat up my $200 startup budget before I powered on a single box.
3. Moar boxes == moar resiliency. My gear at home is part lab and part production environment. Yes, I use it to hack stuff and learn new things, but my family also uses it in their daily lives. Network shares stream cartoons; VOIP phones connect friends; keeping these things going is probably as important as my day job. Being able to try bold and stupid things without endangering the “Family Infrastructure” is important to my quality of life.
4. Scaling out is probably more important than Scaling Up. A typical I.T. Department/Data Center response to capacity problems is to regularly stand up newer/more powerful [expensive] gear and then dump the old stuff. I guess this is a good approach if you have the budget. It certainly has created a market for used gear. I don’t have any budget to speak of, so I want to be able to increase capacity by adding servers while keeping the existing ones in play. There are still cost concerns with this approach, mainly with network equipment. In addition to upping my server game, I am going to have to up my networking game as well.

It works…ish

I have my two cluster nodes *kind of* working, with most of my Linux guests running as containers, which is very memory and CPU efficient. I am running two Windows VMs, PORTAL for remote access and dynamic DNS, and MOONBASE which I am using for tasks that need wired network access. All of my desktops are currently in pieces, having donated their guts to the “Cluster Collective” so I am mostly using my laptop for everything. I am not really in the habit of plugging it in to Ethernet, or leaving it turned on, so for now I am using a VM in place of my desktop for long running tasks like file transfers.

I say that the cluster is only kind of working because my home network isn’t very well segmented and the cluster heartbeat traffic straight up murders my little switch. It took me a while to figure out the problem. So the cluster works for a few days and then my core switch chokes and passes out, knocking pretty much everything offline. For now, the “cluster” is disabled and the second node is powered off until my new network cards arrive and I can configure separate networks for the clustering, storage, and the VMs.

Coming soon: Adventures in Proxmox part 2: You don’t know shit about networking.

Turns out that Bats vs. Supes didn’t suck…

It was just too realistic for some people 🙂